/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23379261]

I want to start reading philosophy. I've never read a single philosophy book before.
>Start with the greeks
So is picrel the best starting point?

[Anonymous No.23379269]

>>23379261
An anthology is probably a better starting place. You can follow thoughts along through many thinkers rather than hyper focusing on one right at the start

[Anonymous No.23379273]

>>23379261
>>23379269
I like picrel

[Anonymous No.23379274]

Start with whatever philosopher you find interesting.

[Anonymous No.23379278]

I think a better starting point would be a book about the history of philosophy, or at least the ancient philosophy. Just to get an idea of what's going on and then jump into Plato and the rest.

[Anonymous No.23379289]

>>23379261
My first entrance to Plato was “essential dialogues of Plato” from Barnes and Noble.

[Anonymous No.23379309]

>>23379274
I agree. Starting with something you find interesting but maybe don't fully understand is fine. Once you feel like sticking through it you can always go back and get knowledge about other things. Pretty much what I did for my degree

[Anonymous No.23379324]

>>23379261
Plato is the best Greek Philosopher.
But his points might go above your head if you don't read the Dialogues along with good secondary literature.

[Anonymous No.23379331]

>>23379324
>his points might go above your head
Do people really? I get people not understanding Kant for example, but Plato?

[Anonymous No.23379380]

>but how do i find philosophers i'm interested in??
>>23379274
>>23379309
more to this point, read works that often use the works of others. that way you can see who you're interested in. you'll find many writers who clearly enjoy the works of men past. The Denial of Death, Loneliness as a Way of Life, The Psychological Construction of Emotion--all full of lovingly added quotes from other thinkers. reading stuff like that gave me a taste for all the authors they quote from. not saying you have to pick those, but that's how i got into it. it's easier to get into it when you read from someone who picks a few cool quotes that strike your interest than it is diving into an anthology. as for how to find works like that, no idea. came upon them by chance but they were topics i was initially interested in anyway.
The Denial of Death makes use of many quotes from Freud, Adler, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Loneliness as a Way of Life takes from Emerson, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville. The Psychological Construction of Emotion takes from James and Darwin (only ones i can remember). i know these aren't all philosophers but you get the idea. it's about getting a taste for it and keeping the fire stoked.

"I have come to kindle a fire on the earth. And what would I rather than that it burnt already."

[Anonymous No.23379410]

>>23379331
Parmenides might be the most difficult text ever written and as well, some of his later dialogues are difficult to parse. I would agree with you if he is only referring to aporia or trial dialogues which are incredibly straightforward.

[Anonymous No.23379431]

>>23379261
If you want to read Plato you need to read the fragments of the pre-Socratics, and to understand the culture of Athens at the time of the dialogues you need to read Thucydides, but to understand his approach to history first you need to Herodotus, but to understand most of his references to Homer you need to read The Iliad and Odyssey first, but to understand them you need some frame of reference for the pantheon of gods first so read a book on that. After all that you can start reading Plato

[Anonymous No.23379437]

>>23379273
Is there anything like this in French?

[Anonymous No.23379442]

>>23379289
Yes, if I'm not mistaken it's mostly butler translations and he took liberties that made it a good first read, other translations you can use for studying much deeper

[Anonymous No.23379468]

>>23379261
I’ll give you a non-meme answer.

The /lit/ recommendation is going to be Sophie’s World.

You can start also with Descartes Meditations on first philosophy, or discourse on the method.

You can also start with Plato’s dialogues, you can find a guide on the order you should read them online.

Those are three solid starting options, and you are going to want to read all of them anyway so it doesn’t matter too much from where you start.

Philosophy is a MASSIVE field with a ton of different subfields so it also depends on your area of interest.

If you only care about ethics then it doesn’t matter how good or interesting of a writer Descartes or Plato is in regards to epistemology if you just don’t give a fuck about epistemology (although *everything* leads back to epistemology).

[Anonymous No.23379470]

>>23379442
You mean Jowett’s translations. Butler was the man who translated Homer.

[Anonymous No.23379512]

>>23379470
Yes, silly me

[Anonymous No.23379547]

>>23379261
Start with a history of philosophy, and then move onto the philosophers who tackle problems that interest you.

[Anonymous No.23379668]

>>23379261

[Anonymous No.23379678]

Start with Coplestone's history of philosophy

[Anonymous No.23379693]

>try starting with the Greek
>it's super boring obvious shit, to anyone who has ever seen Star Trek
Do I have to read ALL of this?

>"Well who better to make a pot but a potter!"
Yeah, I know. You fucking Greek moron...

[Anonymous No.23379710]

>>23379693
Who better to make a pot than a Potter, you claim to understand this yet when I use the same logic with the statement who better to philosophize than a philosophiser it call into question your capacity as a philosophiser, please just stop

[Anonymous No.23379717]

>>23379261
Yes

[Anonymous No.23379737]

>>23379710
It's just fucking boring though. I want someone to tell me things I don't know, and make me think differently about the world.
>well who better to rule society than those who are good at it!
Yeah, I know.

[Anonymous No.23379755]

>>23379737
>I want someone to tell me things I don't know, and make me think differently about the world.
have you thought about reading plato?

[Anonymous No.23379810]

>>23379755
I did, It was boring. That's literally what I'm describing.

[Anonymous No.23379826]

>>23379810
>It was boring
that says more about you than about Plato.

[Anonymous No.23379840]

>>23379826
That I'm smarter than Plato?

[Anonymous No.23379850]

>>23379840
lol not even. more like that you're a brainlet.

[Anonymous No.23379883]

>>23379850
Tell me one revelation you had reading Plato.

[Anonymous No.23379905]

>>23379437
You'd have to look. I am not French so I don't typically look for books in French

[Anonymous No.23379914]

>>23379261
a good start is also the greek myths. (Edith Hamilton,Thomas Bulfinch
,Robert Graves) the gods get named droped a lot across philosophy as a whole so knowing who they are helps.

[Anonymous No.23380407]

What is the question you're trying to answer by reading philosophy?

[Anonymous No.23380504]

>>23379883
The necessity of perfect unity as the ground of being. While reading the Parmenides.

[Anonymous No.23380527]

>>23379914
The theogony of Hesiod is better

[Anonymous No.23380574]

>>23379914
This is good advice if you are training an AI, no one if the real world is going read Edith Hamilton, then the Iliad, then the odyssey, all to read some Plato.

t. Somebody who tried

Just read Apology and see if you like it OP

[Anonymous No.23380588]

>>23379468
Sophie’s world is a great choice, it’s what has gotten me into taking philosophy a bit more seriously.

If you’re more used to reading somewhat ‘advanced’ non-philosophy literature, another avenue you could go to is trying some simpler, shorter essay-form works, that ‘play’ with a philosophical theory without developing tough, elaborate ontological models. I’m thinking about things like;

Plato’s Republic
Montaigne’s essays
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
One of the works by Byung-Chul Han
Zizek’s more pop-literature works (altough these tend to be a bit tougher without any prior knowledge)

Some other good recs in this thread too.

[Anonymous No.23380596]

Begin with the meme trilogy

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Heidegger’s Being and Time

[Anonymous No.23380610]

Plato is a good start imo, you can add some secondary literature or a history of philosophy.
Plato's works vary greatly in length and difficulty though. I wouldn't start with the Republic, the last days of Socrates are good, Euthyphro, Apoligy, Crito, it's an interesting narrative too.

[Anonymous No.23380632]

>>23379737
Is it that obvious though? Most people living in a democracy would disagree, or they implicitly disagree.

[Anonymous No.23380663]

Just go to your local library and pickup a "history of philosophy".

[Anonymous No.23380705]

>>23380527
Apollodorus Mythology is better than both

[Anonymous No.23380747]

>>23379261
Yes picrel is best. But you should read homer first.

[Anonymous No.23380750]

>>23379331
Dont pretend to fully understand Plato. I doubt you have even read the republic more than once.

[Anonymous No.23380760]

we live in an aristotelian world, plato and socrates are pretty irrelevant.

kinda how confucianism is chinese society and culture, but they pay a homage in aesthetics to lao tsu because he comes before and his key message of the dao survives into the modern period. you could read early church fathers and study the origins of the east west split in christianity and then the protestant reformation. or you could skip all that and just read hume, locke, kant and nietzsche and call it a day.

no matter what you do you won't escape the shadow of moral philosophy, so might as well start with it, no human can catch up 2500 years of thinking in one lifetime, but you might grasp the current mood of our civilization, morals, ethics, rights that type of stuff.

[Anonymous No.23380810]

>>23380574
>no one if the real world is going read Edith Hamilton, then the Iliad, then the odyssey, all to read some Plato.
I did

[Anonymous No.23380851]

>>23380760
lmao stfu
at best we live in the shadow of Locke

[Anonymous No.23380867]

>>23379261
I started with Jowett's Plato translations and I loved it.

[Anonymous No.23380873]

Don't ignore the pre-socratics

[Anonymous No.23380926]

>>23380504
Define being and why is it important.

[Anonymous No.23380962]

Hey guys, just checked the archive, and I couldn't find what I was looking for, but what translation do you guys recommend for Seneca's Letters from a Stoic? Penguin?

[Anonymous No.23381004]

I’m starting with mythology Edith Hamilton re pinned post or am I better with the other recs in this thread

[Anonymous No.23382629]

>>23379410
>he think there's any true aporia in plato
filtered, read second lit as stated

[Anonymous No.23382678]

>>23382629
The initiates are certainly given hints to the existence of a secret doctrine. Cornford is right to say that Socrates' failure to define knowledge in propositional terms in the Theaetetus definitely points the way towards the inadequacy of propositional knowledge to attain the final revelation. The revelation is the direct acquaintance knowing of the Forms, but of course this is left unstated. In passages, from the Republic, there is an indication that the truths revealed by dialectic are not ultimate. Socrates tells Glaucon that it appears that dialectic brings us to the end of philosophical enquiry. However, he then hints that there is a further path to ultimate knowledge that dispenses with images and symbols and attains truth directly. Glaucon is then told that, despite having the will to do so, Socrates is unable to show him this path:

[Q27] Tell me, then, what is the nature of this faculty of dialectic? Into what divisions does it fall? And what are its ways? For it is these, it seems, that would bring us to the place where we may, so to speak, rest on the road and then come to the end of our journeying. You will not be able, dear Glaucon, to follow me further, though on my part there will be no lack of good will. And, if I could, I would show you, no longer an image and symbol of my meaning, but the very truth as it appears to me.

[Anonymous No.23382686]

>>23382678
In point of form Logical doctrine has three sides: [a] the Abstract side, or that of understanding; [b] the Dialectical, or that of negative reason; [c] the Speculative, or that of positive reason.

[a] Thought, as Understanding, sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own.

[b] In the Dialectical stage these finite characterisations or formulae supersede themselves, and pass into their opposites.(1) But when the Dialectical principle is employed by the understanding separately and independently — especially as seen in its application to philosophical theories — Dialectic becomes Scepticism; in which the result that ensues from its action is presented as a mere negation.

[c] The Speculative stage, or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms (propositions) in their opposition - the affirmative, which is involved in their disintegration and in their transition.
-Shorter Logic sections 80-82

[Anonymous No.23382730]

>>23382678
>he then hints that there is a further path to ultimate knowledge that dispenses with images and symbols and attains truth directly

This evidently hints at the type of intuition Kant (exoterically) denies in the Inaugural Dissertation when he observes, "No intuition of things intellectual but only a symbolic [discursive] knowledge of them is given to man".

[Anonymous No.23382792]

>>23382730
>exoterically

The EXOTERIC teaching of the Kantian philosophy — that the understanding ought not to go beyond experience, else the cognitive faculty will become a theoretical reason which by itself generates nothing but fantasies of the brain — this was a justification from a philosophical quarter for the renunciation of speculative thought.

[Anonymous No.23382802]

>>23379261
Probably, but be warned it’s very likely you’ll find Plato boring.

[Anonymous No.23382807]

>>23382802
why?

[Anonymous No.23383292]

>>23382807
Because people normally first try reading it for it's content and get caught up in learning about how the greeks viewed religion and life instead of reading Plato for it's structure and dialectic. No one gives a shit if grace or god came first, it's about the dialogue and the rhetorical tools used in it that shape the future of philosophical thought. The critical thinking tools plato teaches in an easy to understand way are why he's important. /lit/ is full of autists who don't understand that and see the world and people as objects, and so they obsess over platonic forms.

[Anonymous No.23383381]

>>23381004
Don’t fall for the Edith Hamilton meme, it a solid book if you want a deeper understand of Greek culture n how their art reflects upon each other, but just start with the platonic dialogues.

[Anonymous No.23383464]

>>23379274
I don’t think that’s a good idea as most philosophers, especially ones who lived before the 20th century, assume their readers are already familiar with the major philosophers who came before them or at the very least, Plato and Aristotle. There is some truth to the saying “all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato.”

[Anonymous No.23383495]

Read some Sumerians first. Code of Hammurabi and Gilgamesh. Philosophy before the Greeks is really good too.

[Anonymous No.23383510]

>>23379331
>>23380750
Unironically you are both correct.